Nurse sues children’s hospital, alleges wrongful termination

Sharon Ochoa-Reyes, a Sunrise Children's Hospital nurse fired in connection with a 2010 baby death in the neonatal intensive care unit, filed a lawsuit Friday against the hospital and four of its executives, charging that she was wrongfully terminated and defamed.

In the 30-page lawsuit filed in Clark County District Court, attorney George Kelesis argued that Sunrise officials made Ochoa-Reyes a "scapegoat" for a long-standing and dangerous problem at the hospital, with the intent of "deflecting attention" from their own failure to make necessary changes.

Sunrise officials said Friday they had not received a copy of the lawsuit and therefore could not comment.

Ochoa-Reyes and another fired nurse, Jessica May Rice, had been called "persons of interest" by Las Vegas police in an investigation into "intentional patient harm," as authorities investigated how catheters came apart in the intensive care unit for children.

Catheters are used to draw blood and deliver medication and nutrition.

The July 2, 2010, death of 2-month-old Miowne Obote, whose catheter was severed, was ruled a homicide by the Clark County coroner.

Ochoa-Reyes' lawsuit said that police sent the catheters to a forensic lab. The analysis completed in the spring of 2011 showed that none of the catheter lines had been cut and "there was evidence of product defect and/or failure." The lawsuit also said that Ochoa-Reyes, 46, passed two polygraph examinations.

When Kelesis was asked where he got the information about the catheter analysis and polygraph exams, he replied, "No comment."

The lawsuit also alleges that police have conspired with Sunrise officials by "providing misleading information in an investigation and improperly and illegally placing plaintiff (Ochoa-Reyes) as a scapegoat for defendant Sunrise."

Police had no comment on the lawsuit Friday.

No criminal charges have ever been filed against the nurses. A spokeswoman for the Clark Country district attorney said this week that the case is still under review and no comment could be made at this time.

Ochoa-Reyes was unavailable for comment. Attorney Kathleen Murphy Jones has said Rice also will file a lawsuit against Sunrise in the future.

In January a federal arbitrator, acting on a complaint brought forward by Service Employees International Union Nevada, ruled that Rice should be reinstated with back pay. Sunrise has refused to do so. A ruling on Ochoa-Reyes' arbitration hearing is pending.

Ochoa-Reyes, who had been employed at the hospital for 19 years, told the Review-Journal in November 2010 that nurses in the neonatal unit had been having problems with catheters breaking for months.

"Even though nurses reported the product failures, the hospital administration basically paid no real attention to it until babies got hurt," she said.

In July 2010, Sunrise officials, in a statement to the media said they had asked Las Vegas police to investigate 14 incidents of "disrupted catheters" that tracked back to February of the same year. They said that one child needed emergency surgery and another was in critical condition: Baby Obote later died while the other child survived.

In the weeks that followed, the Nevada State Board of Nursing summarily suspended the licenses of the two nurses after police told the regulatory agency that each nurse was a "person of interest" in a criminal investigation into "intentional patient harm."

Sunrise fired them.

While criminologists speculated as to whether the pair of nurses could be "angels of death," nurses who say they kill patients out of mercy, authorities refused to say what evidence connected the nurses to "intentional patient harm," a question that remains unanswered to this day.

BOARD REINSTATED NURSES' LICENSES

The mystery of what actually happened in the hospital's intensive care unit for children deepened in September 2010 when the Nursing Board, which is sworn to protect the people of Nevada, ruled there was no evidence that the nurses did anything wrong. The board reinstated their licenses, but Sunrise officials have refused to rehire them.

According to the lawsuit, Sunrise officials did nothing to address an acknowledged problem with catheters until the two babies were hurt in May 2010. The lawsuit alleges problems with catheters had been ongoing since at least December 2009.

"Sunrise conducted no substantive investigation to rule out product defect," the lawsuit said. "Instead they made inflammatory and inaccurate statements to law enforcement, administrative agencies, and the press; concocted and disseminated wild theories of why and how the alleged intentional acts took place; and manufactured self-serving representations proffered as 'evidence' designed to implicate Sharon Ochoa-Reyes."

The lawsuit noted that the forensics expert hired by Sunrise to test the catheter lines did not rule out product failure.

PRODUCT FAILURE NOT TESTED

W. Don Bunn, a failure analysis expert for Oklahoma-based Sherry Laboratories, told the Review-Journal in 2010 that Sunrise administrators "didn't ask me to test for product failures. They only asked me to test to see if the catheters could have been cut. I would have had to do more tests to see if there could have been product failure."

Bunn said he was surprised that the hospital didn't want to know whether there had been product failure. "That's what I'm usually asked to do," he said.

On six catheters he was able to simulate cuts he saw in photos of broken Sunrise catheters by using either razor blades or scissors, suggesting the Sunrise catheters might have been cut. He wasn't able to simulate a cut on a seventh catheter.

Despite what he found in those tests, Dunn said, he could not rule out product failure.

According to the lawsuit, Las Vegas police acted on flawed information from Sunrise in starting its investigation, never employing "reasonable, independent investigation techniques."

The lawsuit said Coroner Mike Murphy admitted that his own investigators "never physically examined the lines" to reach a determination of homicide, instead basing a conclusion on the flawed analysis of the expert Sunrise paid for, Bunn.

The lawsuit alleges that though Ochoa-Reyes passed one polygraph examination, she agreed to a second one in an effort to show she had nothing to hide. Yet in the second exam, according to the lawsuit, polygrapher Geoffrey Flohr got within inches of her face and shouted at her with statements designed to "fluster, confuse, frighten and intimidate."

According to the lawsuit, the shouted statements included: "Everyone at Sunrise in pointing the finger at you, "You are a liar," "You have done a disservice to helpless babies," "You're like Jeffrey Dahlmer," and "Perhaps you are sick."

Still, the lawsuit said, the nurse "passed all valid metrics on the second polygraph examination and others were purportedly inconclusive."

Sunrise president and CEO Sylvia Young sent a mass e-mail to employees that was "designed to further the hospital's drummed up case" against Ochoa-Reyes, the lawsuit said.

In one email, the lawsuit alleges that Young claimed that "the forensics engineer conducted microscopic examination of the lines and his report showed the lines had been cut."

"Young did not mention," the lawsuit argues, "that Sunrise had limited the scope of his investigation."

According to the lawsuit, the allegations against Ochoa-Reyes have caused her emotional distress in addition to costing her her job. Though she found another job as a nurse, she has not been able to find work in her chosen field of caring for infants.

The lawsuit asks for unspecified damages, naming as defendants Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center and CEO Young, human resource director Robert Eisen, Dan Davidson, a hospital spokesman, and hospital administrator Todd Sklamberg .

Contact reporter Paul Harasim at pharasim@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2908.